[Urbane Guerrilla]

Capitalism's great virtue as an economic system may be that it isn't a system at all, but merely what human beings will do with each other by way of making deals, absent gross interference by the coercive powers of the State.

The idea that "money" is in essence "information" -- a way of keeping score -- is not unique to capitalism. Mercantilism had it also, as did earlier economic overall concepts, hardly dignifiable as fully realized theories. The concept of credit essentially reduces "money" to "information."

But at any rate, capitalism seems to use the idea of money as information most smoothly and to greatest wealth-generating effect.

Capitalism is the best system known for general generation of wealth, and without wealth, you have nothing but trouble and misery. Examine the troubled and miserable places on Earth and you speedily see these are places without wealth and without much wealth generation going on. Look further, and you see there is active interference with the wealth generation, both cultural and the merely corrupt -- essentially, Basically, the happy places are the ones that know how to get rich and don't have to concern themselves with whether their wealth will be arbitrarily raped away from them. These are the places with full-on capitalism.

For a fairly good if lightly treated exigesis on capitalism's virtues vis-a-vis every other "system" that's been tried, read the entire body of P.J. O'Rourke. His intellectually weightiest effort on capitalism and incidentally on economics is his recent On The Wealth of Nations -- he's either been taking a course or he's been working on this one a long time, as Adam Smith can be pretty thick with the paragraphs.

College students often flirt with socialism or alternative-isms if they can imagine any. But real-world experience with getting jobs, keeping jobs and above all, with offering jobs -- this will tell a man that capitalism works and works best.

Capitalism + Ethics = best and surest Wealth. Everywhere and for everyone. Capitalism is a human "system," that works with humanity's strengths. Communism, as Edmund O. Wilson remarked, was an "Interesting idea. Wrong species."